I have one of the new iPads. For both my email and Twitter, I’m able to talk into it and get speech to text (with Dragonfly voice-recognition software). It’s become more and more efficacious, which is great and convenient. If you start to think — one of the only barriers of people publishing is people have to type. What if that goes away? Just a huge explosion. Instead of going on the phone and talking about prom night, we’re either at or near a place where they can speak it in their phone and it’ll appear in text. What if people don’t have to type to get it into there? Does that make what we do more or less valuable? There’s more for us to sift through. But we’re the signal in the noise, and it’ll make us more valuable. I’m fairly democratic in my impulses. I don’t want more crap out there, but I think the fact that I need to type my thoughts means I share less of them.
– New York Times journalist, David Carr.
(I have to admit, I have thought about speech recognition software as a way to speed up my writing process many times. I am terrible at typing, somewhat ironically for a professional writer; what keeps me away from using any kind of speech recognition is the fact that I’m convinced my accent will prove so confusing to it that I’ll likely spend more time correcting transcription errors.)